I play the video.
Then again.
The caption says Mountain Dulcimer, Missouri. I don’t see the woman’s face. The camera stays on her hands and the instrument, the grain of the wood, the frets worn smooth from years of use. I watch it a third time, focusing on her right hand, the way her fingers move across the strings, and a longing inside me answers before the rest of me catches up. Then I watch it a fourth time.
I set the guitar aside.
The instrument is small. I can tell from the scale of it against the woman’s hands, the narrow body, the whole thing builtfor a lap instead of a chest. My fingers make other guitar players wince sympathetically when they watch me tune, and I’ve learned to ignore that because the fingers know what they’re doing regardless of how they look doing it. But this is different. I picture my left hand on the neck of it and almost talk myself out of the whole thing.
There’s a quick run near the end that I’ve started waiting for, even though I know exactly when it’s coming. When it arrives, I watch the whole video a fifth time just to hear it again.
I stop talking myself out of anything.
Her website is spare and professional. There’s no photo of her, which surprises me until I keep scrolling and understand. She’s not the product. The instruments are. Plain ones, decorated ones, custom work, commissions open. The site tells me almost nothing about the woman and a great deal about the work, which feels deliberate.
I pause on the page of decorated instruments.
Whatever she’s doing to the wood is remarkable. The designs are burned in rather than applied: the lines have actual depth, and the paint sits inside them like it grew there. I enlarge one photo after another, then sit here longer than I mean to, looking at a flowering vine worked into pale wood with the kind of attention that makes the instrument feel like someone has already loved it for years.
She makes these.
The about page gives me the basics. Custom mountain dulcimers, commissions open, ships worldwide.
The address is twenty-three miles away.
Twenty-three miles. I could drive it in half an hour. I sit with that: twenty-three miles, a Friday night, a video I’ve now watched five times, and feel recognition settle in, less like coincidence and more like a door that was already standing open. If she’d been in Montana, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably reached out anyway. Probably. But twenty-three miles removes the last excuse I might have made.
The email address is at the bottom of the page, and I use it because I am someone who moves toward things rather than filling out forms and waiting. I tell her I’m a musician interested in learning the mountain dulcimer. Twenty-three miles away, I add. I tell her I’m an orc, because it’s better to say it first. Then I ask if she does consultations.
After sending the email, I set the phone beside me and play something slow and descending that doesn’t have a name.
Her response comes in twenty minutes. Brief and direct. Yes, consultations. Here is her availability. She doesn’t mention the orc thing. We set a time for the following Thursday.
I read it twice.
Then I set the phone face-down on the cushion.
For a while, the guitar stays quiet across my knees.
Chapter Two
Honey
The gouge is about three inches long and runs with the grain. At some point in the last hundred years, a doorframe, a fall, or someone moving furniture without thinking had left a mark. The wood beneath is sound. The instrument is fine. It just looks like what it is, which is old.
I run my thumb along it while my new customer, Carol, tells me about her grandmother.
She's been talking for ten minutes. I stopped needing new information after the first two. Grandmother played. Grandmother is gone. The mountain dulcimer, or lap dulcimer, as some people call it, has been in a closet for eleven years. Now she'd like to hang it above the fireplace, and she'd like it to looknice. What she means is she'd like the damage to disappear. I understand. I can do that.
My thumb brushes along the scar again without me meaning it to.
The spruce top has gone amber with age, rich where the light catches it. Whoever built this a century ago built it right. I can feel that before I test a single string. Carol is still explaining where it usually sits on the mantel, but my hands have already decided.
I tune the first string by ear, find the second, adjust the third. "Sorry," I say. "Do you mind?"
She stops. "Oh… no, go ahead."
After I tune the fourth string, I sit and move it to the familiar spot in my lap. Then I play the opening bars of "Shady Grove," because it's the first thing my grandmother ever taught me and it comes out of my hands before I think about it. The sound that fills the workshop is warm and dark. It's the mellow resonance old wood acquires after decades of Sunday mornings in someone's living room.
